In the end, Mum completed the visa application for Saudi Arabia herself.
Ed and I wore matching T-shirts and trousers, outfits she had bought specially for the trip. As she had once dressed for dinner, now she dressed us for the flight.
Flying, to my intense disappointment, was sitting still, with nothing to look at through the window. British Airways wouldn’t be privatised until 1987 and was considered by everyone across the eastern Gulf coast to be the poor man’s choice. However the drinks were free, and on the milk run between Heathrow and Dhahran in the late seventies, that was the only important consideration.
In October 1977 everyone on that plane was a worker heading east to the driest country on earth. Getting completely hammered was mandatory, and every adult did. On one return flight into Terminal 3 a few years later, Dad was so drunk the flight crew weren’t able to manhandle him into his seat for landing. He flailed about in economy until the plane hit the tarmac, levelling him in the aisle.
But that first evening, as we disembarked, we found the wind blew hot like a hairdryer, and the slow burn of the sun from the sky was replaced by a sudden plunge into night. Far into the distance, beyond the runway, a few orange streetlights marked out a path through the waste of desert, and in the distance huge flames tore into a black sky.
Only in 2006 did Saudi Arabia begin issuing tourist visas, and with huge restrictions – no single women under the age of thirty, no unmarried couples and no Jews. It is not a country that wants to invite the world in. Back then we were mere workers, submitted to a frisk and search, like janitors heading into a jail.
Getting through customs at Dhahran took hours. The long line of westerners were scrutinised bag by bag, shirt by shirt, a mess of belongings accumulating beneath the tables. The queues were chaotic and the inspection team, wearing white gloves, unpredictable. They were looking for ham, alcohol and indecent material. There was talk of women strapping bacon to their stomachs, or smuggling porn in a concealed compartment of their suitcases, but the things we lost beneath the table were more innocent: a children’s book, or a jar of olives, making a bottle of gin feel as dangerous as an IED. The Saudi justice system lacked any logic, and once tangled up in it there was a sense that anything could happen. Anything at all.
So, rightly, the Marks & Spencer’s clothing was of huge concern as we waited. However, without labels it was impossible to prove our clothes had been stitched by infidels, and so, duly disembowelled, we trailed out from behind the temporary partitions, struggling to carry what we hadn’t been able to repack.
The arrivals hall teemed with men wearing identical uniforms of white dresses, their heads bound in red checked scarves, sandals flacking across the marble floor. Occasionally there was a figure swathed in yards of black polyester, hennaed hands holding the material tight over her face.
Of seeing Dad I remember nothing until we were careering through the darkness in a dusty cab, Arabic music belting out the open windows. Looking over into the back seat he told us that there had been a problem with our accommodation.
‘We’ve been allocated a flat in Dammam.’
‘Dammam?’ Mum leant forward to be heard better. ‘You said we’d be given a house.’
I watched the prayer beads swing from the rearview mirror and clutched the back of the passenger seat.
‘You wouldn’t believe’, he said, ‘the incompetence of these people.’
Through the windscreen the flames shrank away to the north, the skyline of a town looming ahead.
‘Where the hell’s Dammam?’ Mum asked.
Dammam was where the buildings and roads were unfinished, sand driven up onto the patchy pavements by a chaos of cars. Dammam was where weevils overran our cornflakes and rats the size of Dad’s shoe overran the front step. All of it became proof to my mother that he had pretended in his application he was single. The reason there had been no house ‘on compound’, she said after his death, was because he simply had not applied for one. Dammam, she told me, was where his lies caught him up.